Tending Joy

I'm finding myself surprisingly curmudgeonly about the state of my country and its assorted incarnations of mass culture.

Everywhere these days I hear far more judgmentalness than seems appropriate or useful. Reminds me of a long-dead elderly relative who would ask to be taken for a "nice Sunday drive" and spend the whole time praising or blaming everything that met the eye.

"What a pretentious two-story portico? It just looks foolish; some people have no taste. Why ..." and on and on, non-stop, until we rounded the next corner. "That's a marvelous tree, look at those spreading branches. You don't see many of those now-a-days, ..."

But in those days, that was the only person I knew who took that approach to the world. The press seemed more neutral. Now every news story seems to be taking a position. The reporter (or the publication) is for something, or against something, or if they're not, they're either making fun of something or pitying something. Feh!

Which brings me to this rant.

I've been reading several of the bloggers on stroller-derby and babble, and I'm just about to have to stop. It seems that every post asks for my opinion, even on matters where I have no opinion, or where I have no preference, and often on matters that are none of my business. Most posts seem to end with: "What do you think? Should [insert public figure's name here] have done what they did? or are they just being insensitive?" Others ask, "What do you think? Was the judge right to impose such a [adjective] sentence? or should the convicted malefactor have received a [opposite-of-adjective] sentence instead?"

I prefer the minority of babble's writers who ask, instead, "What would you do in this situation?" which has the virtue of at least being a question about my preferences or opinions about what I should do in my own life -- not a request for a referendum on someone else's life.

For a long time I thought this "What do you think: Should We Let Them Do That or Should We Punish Them?" kind of ending was just a trademark way of trying to start a conversation in the comments section, but then I began to feel overloaded with incitements to judgmentalness regarding the actions of other people. The people I was being invited to judge probably had complex reasons for doing what they did, as well as entire lives of history contributing to their choices -- none of which was covered in the six or ten paragraph story. What should they have done? How in the world would I presume to know?

"Should parents allow their kid to do such and such?" Why is this my business? Don't we want both parents and children to have a certain amount of autonomy? self-responsibility? even, variety of upbringing?

I'm on the point of voting with my feet, deleting a dozen bloggers from my reading list. But I wonder if there isn't a way to start a conversation on babble about this. I'm fine, really, with being told a story about something that is happening in the writer's real life, and then being invited to say how that issue might show up in my own real life. But don't ask me whether the governor of some state should have handled the unmarried pregnancy of a teenage relative the way they did or not. I don't want to be asked to judge the girl or her family; I don't want to be asked to judge the politician for the amount of savoir faire they might or might not have in the face of family scandal. 

Beyond my personal "yucch! factor," there is a larger question here. Do I really want to be living in a culture that presumes it's fine for each of us to judge all the others, 24/7, for whatever we can find out about how they live in their personal lives?

Maybe the question I want to read, at the end of a blog entry is, "How would this play out if it happened in your family?" or "Has this ever happened to you? What did you do? How did that work out for you?"

So, Dear Readers, what do you think? Is there a conversation to be had here? What might I or we do to make space for a little freedom and a little less judgment? Or is that none of my business?

This started as a comment on a post by bellamagic ...

... and I'm grateful for the thought-process that showed up in response to what she said.

My Beloved Husband likes to have talking-heads TV on in the background whenever he's doing something by himself -- cooking, carpentry, whatever. If he's driving he'll choose talk radio for the same reason -- voices he can listen to or not, words in a row. He listens equally often to Rush Limbaugh and to NPR.

Some of the folks like Chris Matthews or Bill Buckley I've always taken for right-wing social conservatives (at least, except when Buckley was writing about sailing, which was lovely stuff and entirely apolitical). But lately it looks to me like they're simply complaining, being the narrowest kind of 'reactionary.'

Here in rural Guatemala where the only Anglophone TV is Fox & Friends, their criticism of Washington under Bush and under Obama ... has hardly changed at all!

The overriding tone of their remarks is always 'Eeek, eek, look what they did, oooh it's awful, what do you think it means in the worst-case scenario ... who will be hurt ... what do you think will be the most awful outcome ... and let's please all think the worst of the folks who did it.'

Where is the question 'How will this improve matters? What do you think this could mean in the best-case scenario?

Never mind what we used to think of as dispassionate, rational, objective and neutral analysis? (which may no longer exist on the airwaves).

I think the national media have chosen to exist to scare us.

Myself I think this may go back to a 1960s (or earlier?) observation among the psychologists who study advertising: that the best way to sell something is to "discover" a problem that your prospect has (or might have, or might be persuaded they risk having in the future) and then explain why the product you happen to be selling is the perfect solution.

You can't get people to buy deodorant until you've persuaded them that they stink.

I think the stories we tell ourselves matter -- and the stories we let the media tell us matter, too. When the story is "we see a solution, we're making progress toward getting there, we will get through this intact" our bodies, our emotions, and our mental processes are stronger, more effective, more clear. When the story is "we can't do it, it's not working, what if it all goes wrong" our bodies, our emotions, and our thoughts are weaker, more muddy, far less effective in bringing forward what we choose to have in our lives.

Me, I want to listen to a 'good news' station -- where the top-of-the-hour story (instead of "if it bleeds, it leads") is about, say, the business person who visited a 1st grade for career day, listened to the kids talk about their lives and expectations, and made a commitment to pay for college for every one of those kids if they'd work hard and graduate ... and visited them more than once a year to offer encouragement and answer questions.

... or the three Mayan women I met last month who formed a collective to sell their weavings direct to the tourist, thereby offering better prices and more choices to the tourists and increasing their own income at the same time.

... or anything the Dalai Lama said today

... or a yoga demonstration in Times Square

... or something our government has done / is doing that looks hopeful, with commentary on why it could work and how it could improve matters.

Hmm. Something to chew on.

This morning I am so grateful.

Grateful for the deep soaking rain which nourishes our woodland, replenishes the aquifer from which we draw our water. Deeply grateful for its arrival in the wee hours of this morning, rather than just three or five days ago when I was camping in the highlands without a tent.

Grateful for the sweep of political changes in this midterm election. Grateful that I get to keep my favorite congressman and that a neighboring district ditched its single-issue arch-conservative fundamentalist congressman. Grateful for familiar faces at the voting table in my home district.

Grateful for the love and support of family and friends.

Grateful for Monday night's journaling gathering, even without our leader and her wonderful grab-bag of new techniques. Somehow the opportunity to put pictures and colors with my words led to some wonderfully clear statements about my Vision Fast experience.

Grateful, too, for last night's family dinner, the listening ears of my favorite people. Noticing that we've been together now 15 years -- through lots of thick and not a little thin, actually -- still cooperatively working together to create and keep this beautiful house and all that it allows us.

Grateful for warmth and deep hot baths, grateful for the great lighting, fast computer connection, dry storage space this house provides.

Grateful for wonderful adult children who are making their way in the world doing what they're doing in the best way they know at the moment.

Grateful for challenges and opportunities to see clearly.

Grateful for hope, trust, and faith -- especially for those moments when I feel like I can trust our governmental processes.

Thanks to chelidon , and to Leonard Pitts whose article he cites, for sparking this rant.

I'm sad that Colin Powell is so late acknowledging that the World is (and has been) doubting the purity of American intentions. I'm glad he's finally stepped up to speak up. I'm hoping that Congress will show some cojones and pass a real, strong anti-torture bill.

And I'm _not_ giving two hours a day of my attention to the news media.

Gavin de Becker's book, _The Gift of Fear_, talks about the important difference between the stab of adrenaline that gets you to dive for cover in the nick of time (good, useful fear) and the constant drip of adrenaline engendered by 'eek, eek' newscasts that makes you irritable and numb (the kind of fear we don't need to keep, just need to process and release).

He points out the necessity of always listening to the first kind, even for those of us who live in war zones, even if it has sometimes 'cried wolf' before. And the necessity of carefully dismantling the second kind, even when our leaders or mediavoices are telling us to be afraid, because constant fear actually hampers our ability to take ourselves to safety in time of emergency.

All around me people I love have begun to show signs of chronic stress. "Oh, no," begins far too many sentences in my hearing. Folks are constraining their lives to stay beneath the radar of a government insatiable for 'villains'. Folks are constraining their lives to avoid their fear of some future 'terrorist' action.

Heads up, people: the biggest source of 'terror' in our American world, just now, is Americans. Rogue judges (see NYTimes front page article today about what used to be called Justices of the Peace), rogue cops (see your local newscast or any episode of a cop-based TV show), congressional malfeasance, extraordinary rendition by government bureaus both seen and secret ...

The biggest source of terror in my immediate vicinity is actually the news media. The 'omigod its a disaster' tone of coverage makes it hard to tell the difference between a major terrorist attack, a major natural disaster, or a major bus crash. The constant selection of the top three stories of the hour by 'if it bleeds, it leads,' making sure every newscast includes at least one bloody catastrophe (human-made or natural), one official misconduct (embezzlement of millions, or at least hundreds, or else sexual misdeeds), the bloodiest local murder or juiciest local scandal...

Usually if I happen by when the six o'clock news is on, my reaction is "what, didn't anything good happen today?" I know better, though, than to watch broadcast news daily. Whenever I've done that, I've found my baseline heartrate and bloodpressure have gone up, my hours of comfortable sleep have gone down, and my general tolerance for the well-meaning ordinary behavior of my loved ones has gone down. And why, exactly, would I choose to do any of that?

I'm ready for a good-news station to appear -- maybe XM or Sirius can be persuaded to testdrive one. I want a newscast that headlines "church group saves 25 teen boys from jail by offering afterschool program" or "school principal reduces drop out rate by 20% in first year". I want newscasts that gather and promote stories like the philanthropist who adopted an entire ghetto sixth grade and promised to fund college for all of them if they kept their grades up ... and is keeping his promise.

I want news stories like the movie "Pay it Forward", like the movie "Coach Carter." I want presidential candidates like the presidents shown in "Dave," "West Wing," "Commander in Chief," and "An American President" -- and I want to hear enough of their own speeches to get a sense of who they are and what they stand for. I don't want to hear "opposition reaction" to any political speech until I've had at least 24 hours to think about what _I_ heard the candidate or office-holder say.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste -- don't give yours to national television.

[walks away mumbling to herself]

...